Two business communication faculty share the story of teaching a 780-person business writing class. The article discusses the challenges of teaching such a large writing class. Challenges ranged from adopting a hybrid course model to hiring adjunct faculty for help with the task of grading. The article offers lessons learned, and recommends that one proceed with caution when considering a superlarge format for writing instruction. Both theory and experience are used to support this position.

The myth of self-sacrifice is a belief in the value of caring and serving, regardless of personal cost, which characterizes attitudes toward women’s work in general and contingent faculty work in particular, especially writing instruction. “Women’s work” functions as a specific trope in the academy, particularly the high demand for such services, along with the unwillingness to pay for them. The comparison itself is not new; however, worth examining is how the very arguments proclaiming the value of women’s work in a capitalist system—and contingent work in the academy—are also used to undermine its value in that system.”

Inspired by games such as the various Tycoon titles, DESPAIR (Department of English Simulated Problematic Adjunct Instructor Relations) puts players in the role of a Writing Program Administrator (WPA) in order to shed light on the plight of contingent labor in the writing classroom and within the larger institutional framework. The game's alternate mode, UPLIFT (Utopian Potential for Life with Instructors at Full Time), provides an example of a way academics might use simulation games to advocate for change in an affirmative manner by demonstrating how alternatives might work.

Abstract This longitudinal mixed-methods study assesses students’ perceptions of the writing center at a large (approximately 11,325 students) multi‑campus two‑year college. The survey was collaboratively designed, with faculty and student participation; it presents findings from 865 student respondents, collected by peer tutors‑in‑training. The study offers a baseline assessment (Fall 2014) of the writing center, prior to wide-sweeping changes in recruitment, staffing, and training models, as well as a post-assessment (Fall 2015) analysis of the changes in student knowledge of the WC and its purpose. It also offers data on the trajectory of student development in relation to number of sessions attended. In 2014, students’ experiences at the writing center were inconsistent; the poorly articulated mission of the WC adversely affected students’ knowledge scores, and the center’s reliance on editorial-like feedback, given predominately by adjunct faculty, contributed to inconsistent reportage in perceived learning by attended sessions. Many of these trends, however, reversed in 2015. This paper seeks to demonstrate the important role that RAD research can play in evaluating student learning within writing center contexts and articulating how and at what moments, and under what conditions, learning and development occurs in the student-writing center relationship. It also offers a replicable experimental method that researchers at other institutions can adapt and apply to their own institutional contexts and programmatic needs.

0Make, O Muse...0.1 Knowing I was speaking about disruption, I thought what's more disruptive than playing punk music for an academic talk? So I played punk for you. I'll play some more punk for you after the talk. It's hard to be complacent when you listen to punk. If you want, stick that in your head as the soundtrack for today's talk. Punk and disruption may also produce in your mind's eye the image of friends working in a garage or the basement, and I encourage you to keep that image in your head, because whether they're taking a new approach to rock and roll or inventing the Apple computer, the garage tinkerer and inventor is our muse today as we reflect on making disruptive and innovative action in our discipline and our organization.1CCCC1.01 I've been coming to the C's for a long time, since I was a graduate student in the '80s. For me (like many of you, I'm sure), the CCCC is a natural academic home. And it's easy to see why: a wide range of pedagogical approaches visible in the program, all our theories on display, varied interests (FYC, creative nonfiction, creative writing, linguistics, rhetorical theory, history, technical and professional writing), and a general concern about writing both in the classroom and in society. The convention has one of the friendliest and most helpful group of members in higher education. It's a culture of fun (witness C's the Day and its Sparkleponies), and a culture of sharing and learning, where most of us are like Chaucers Clerk in that would we [all] learn and gladly teach1.02 We have an acceptance rate that's stingy-but not too stingy- so that we can put a lot of people on the program. There are workshops on Wednesdays, and we serve as a magnet for other organizations such as TYCA, ATTW, and WPA-GO to meet at the same general time.1.03 And during this same span of time that I've been coming to our convention (which is, unbelievably, almost thirty years), I have seen the C's take steady and meaningful steps to become more than a guild of writing teachers and researchers, but also an organization committed to openness, access, inclusivity:We have established travel and research scholarships that are designed to enable travel to and participation in the convention for both international and domestic scholars who may not have travel support from their institutions. These awards, along with reduced registration fees, have benefited a host of traditionally marginalized scholars, including contingent faculty, graduate students, retired members, Latin American scholars, tribal fellows, LGBTQ scholars, among others. And the one that started it all, the Scholars for the Dream in 1993, includes membership in NCTE/CCCC, travel assistance, and mentoring to help foster future leaders in our organization.We have an inclusive leadership structure, where elected positions on the executive committee, nominating committee, and chair rotation are broadly representative of the diversity of our organization. And we continue to evolve in this respect. Did you know, for example, that we have in the last five years added elected positions on the EC for graduate students and contingent faculty?What sort of new discussions are possible in governance with broader representation?We have created and supported research throughout our organization, rewarding scholars at all levels, from our undergraduate posters to graduate students, our book and article awards, and our wildly successful research initiative.We have taken steps to ensure inclusivity without regard to rank, tenure, job title, or type of institution. We feature undergraduate research posters, a graduate student on the EC, a thriving cross-generational (XGEN) initiative, and SIGs for grad students and retired professors. The program includes papers and roundtables from graduate students, adjunct and contingent faculty, tenure-track faculty, non-academic or alt-ac practitioners-from private institutions, two-year, four-year, regional universities, and R1's. …

This special issue takes up a singular question: What would it mean to incorporate social justice into our writing assessments? This issue aims to foreground the perspectives of contributors whose voices are not typically heard in writing assessment scholarship: non-tenure-track faculty, HBCU WPAs, researchers interested in global rhetorics, queer faculty, and faculty of color. These voices have too often not been heard in writing assessment scholarship. There is no doubt that the first step toward projects of social justice writing assessment is to listen to those who have not been heard, to make more social the project of socially just writing assessment. The guest editors argue that there is much to be learned by making the writing assessment “scene,” as Chris Gallagher would say, more inclusive.

Drawing on forty-eight interviews with individuals who participated on the academic job market in rhetoric and composition between 2010 and 2015, this essay shows how conceptualizing the academic job search as an intimate endeavor can offer insights for understanding the rhetorical production of affective binds within institutional contexts.

FORUM: Issues about Part-Time and Contingent Faculty is a peer-reviewed publication concerning working conditions, professional life, activism, and perspectives of non-tenure-track faculty in college

Grounded in a series of local accounts, this webtext examines complex issues facing pre-tenure writing program administrators as they enter the professoriate while negotiating hybrid identities as teachers, researchers, and administrators. Developed out of a roundtable at the 2014 Conference on College Composition and Communication, the project also emphasizes contemporary alternatives to roundtable design that regard openness, accessibility, and persistence as priorities for delivery and circulation.

This essay examines four disciplinary challenges that faculty from broad, diverse disciplines such as rhetoric and composition encounter during tenure, promotion, and reappointment (TP&R) and highlights the arguments and rhetorical strategies that can be utilized to demonstrate scholarly worth and significance.

Writing retreats are an invaluable way of providing research students and early career researchers with opportunities for extended periods of time for their writing (MacLeod et al., 2012; Murray, 2013, 2014, 2015; Murray and Newtown, 2009; Murray et al., 2012; Petrova and Coughlin, 2012). This is important both for students who are under pressure for timely completion of their degrees and academic staff in the early stages of their careers who, once they have obtained an academic appointment, need to establish themselves in their fields as well as meet tenure track requirements that have been set by their employing institutions. This is as true for native speaking writers as it is for non-native speaking writers (Habibie, 2015), all of whom have to be able to write academically in English, the international language of research, and often face challenges in doing this. This paper discusses both the nature and benefits of writing retreats. It then provides an example of a writing retreat that focuses on writing for publication that has been on offer for the past four years at the University of Sydney, Australia. It describes how the retreat has evolved, how it is organized in its present form, and how participants have responded to the retreat. The paper concludes by arguing that writing retreats are a valuable opportunity for writing pedagogy, showing how both pedagogy and opportunities for extended writing can be brought together within the context of these retreats.

Symposium contribution.

We report the results of a pilot study that offers the field of technical and professional communication its first look at material working conditions of contingent faculty, such as course loads, compensation, and professional support. Findings include that contingent faculty are more enduring with stable full-time, multi-year contracts; they carry a substantial teaching loads; and the majority are satisfied and happy in their present position, but half would prefer to be working on the tenure track.

Background: This teaching case describes the evolution of a course on content strategy aimed at advanced undergraduates and graduate students in the digital and professional writing programs at Michigan State University. The course has gone through three major shifts to reflect corresponding shifts in focus among professional and technical communicators: from developing content for the World Wide Web (original focus) to single sourcing; from single-sourcing to Enterprise Content Management Systems (ECMS), and from ECMS to content strategy. The case primarily focuses on the most recent shift. Research questions: How can a course on content strategy be useful to both advanced undergraduates preparing to enter the job market in industry and graduate students interested in learning theories in technical communication? In turn, how can a course on content strategy reflect current practices in industry while maintaining grounding for the course in academic research? Situating the case: Three emerging themes relevant to teaching content strategy emerge in the literature. The first is the role of the content strategist as an Editor-in-Chief, who creates a repeatable system for designing and managing all aspects of a website [1, 2, 3]. The second is the need to develop strategies for addressing stakeholders, especially clients and users, whose goals are to learn more about why they should invest in an organization and its broader vision. The third is adapting content for reuse, which involves designing content that can be easily accessed through various platforms and formats. How the case was studied: This is an experience report by the four faculty members who, together, have taught every section of the course in the last 15 years. Two of the instructors also participated in the course as students. About the case: The most recent version of the course is a one-term course that teaches theory and best practices for managing dynamic and distributed web content, while also incorporating assignments that help students practice content strategies with real clients. It addressed these issues with the previous version that focused on content management by collaborating with industry practitioners to help students understand the real-world implications of developing strategies for and creating web content with clients and organizations. It specifically addresses three themes identified from the literature-emphasizing the role of the content strategist as an Editor-in-Chief, differentiating the needs of clients and users, and designing for reuse. Course assignments include a landscape analysis of content-management systems and strategies used by various companies, designing content templates for specific clients, and developing a content strategy for a client selected by student groups. Key issues to address when developing the most recent version of the course included creating a course that was useful to graduate and undergraduate students aiming to enter content strategy professions, developing a balance between theory and practice in course readings and assignments, and revising a course to reflect current industry demands for skills in content strategy. Results: Anecdotal evidence from students is that the course was successful and acts as a defacto capstone for the program. Through their course evaluations and unsolicited follow-up emails, students exiting the most recent version of this course became valuable assets who help organizations develop big-picture strategies for adaptable content to be shared through various platforms. Conclusion: A course on content strategy that incorporates current industry perspectives helps graduate and undergraduate professional writing students become more adequately prepared for their future professions working with organizations.

This essay describes a year-long, grant-funded, cross-institutional collaborative project between Boise State University and the College of Western Idaho, a community college. The goal of the project was to institute an Accelerated Learning Program (ALP) model for first-year and basic writing in response to a state mandate to embrace Complete College Idaho, a form of Complete College America. The essay depicts the institutional context of each college and analyzes the challenges and benefits of the new model at each institution. The authors consider the differing roles of full-time and contingent faculty at the two institutions and the challenge of defining reasonable grant work requirements, given the varied teaching, research, and service expectations of instructors. The piece also considers the complex reasons Idaho students may not finish higher education and the extent to which the goals of Complete College Idaho could be met by instituting an accelerated model.

Multimodal pedagogy is increasingly accepted among composition scholars. However, putting such pedagogy into practice presents significant challenges. In this profile of Washington State University’s first-year composition program, we suggest a multi-vocal and multi-theoretical approach to addressing the challenges of multimodal pedagogy. Patricia Ericsson, the director of composition, illustrates how theories of agency are central to the integration of multimodality. Elizabeth Sue Edwards, a graduate teaching assistant, explores negotiating departmental standards and implementing multimodal assignments. Tialitha Michelle Macklin, also a graduate teaching assistant, discusses her journey from rejecting multimodal assignments to embracing them as an integral element of her pedagogy. And Leeann Downing Hunter, a non-tenure-track faculty member, approaches the challenge through the lens of adaptability. We believe that this multi-vocal approach to building a multimodal composition program offers: (1) a foundation for other writing programs to adapt and build upon; (2) an alternative to traditional approaches that rely on single theories and single leaders; and (3) a reconstitution of how the university works, integrating stakeholder voices from administrators to students themselves.

This program profile describes recent changes to the process for preparing graduate teaching instructors (GTAs) in North Carolina State University’s first-year writing program. The authors—one a non-tenure-track faculty member and the other a tenure-track faculty member—describe the philosophical, ethical, and practical concerns in scaling teacher preparation to accommodate rapidly growing cohorts of MA and MFA GTAs. By providing an example of cross-tier collaboration, the authors propose an approach to GTA preparation that takes into account that many of these novice teachers will begin their teaching careers as contingent faculty colleagues.

Present Tense is happy to announce that one of our Editors has started a tenure-track position this year. Don Unger, our Social Media Editor, is now an Assistant Professor of Professional Writing at St. Edward’s University.

Although I do not know Richard Doyle personally, I would say that Darwin's Pharmacy: Sex Plants and the Evolution of the Noosphere is a deeply personal book. Not only does the author offer multiple accounts of his own multicontinental explorations of intraspecies cross-pollination, but he also provides many rhetorical analyses of trip reports, biological treatises, and science fiction, all of which seem to be crucial constitutive elements of his research. That is, this is not a book that offers abstract erudition—though there is plenty of content that anyone can extract from it—but one that offers something more rare. Here, I am reminded of Goethe's famous remark, which Nietzsche chose to use as the epigraph to his Untimely Meditations: “In any case, I hate everything that merely instructs me without augmenting or directly invigorating my activity” (1982, 59). Another way of saying this is that the “personal” quality of this book indicates something quite different from one person's idiosyncratic attempt to expand their consciousness—whether through learning or smoking. Instead, it points toward a kind of impersonal singularity that is the conjunction of multiple affective/conceptual directions and speeds. It is, in short, a pedagogy in the strongest sense.So as not to be misleading, I should also say that I did know someone else named Doyle some fifteen years ago when I was a graduate student at Penn State. That other Doyle (not exactly “Richard”) was then an assistant professor who had only just published his first book exploring the “rhetorical software” that enabled the field of molecular biology and that drove the sequencing frenzy that was the Human Genome Project. I am indebted to that other Doyle for provoking in me an enthusiasm for thinking and for teaching me that if our scholarship is to be worth anything at all, it must be oriented toward learning how to live. Indeed, reading, writing, teaching, and all the practices of our industry are inextricably parts of life and therefore parts of a carbon- (and silicon-) based ecology that need to be taken seriously if we are going to claim to have been alive at all. But as Darwin's Pharmacy shows, learning how to live is often a brutal, painful, and even a literally nauseating process. Suffice to say that I did not like that Doyle then any more than I like this other one now. But I have learned from (and with) them both.This book is remarkable for several reasons. First, and most apparent, is because it manages to connect extraordinarily disparate discourses in ways that in retrospect look obvious. The chapter entitled “LSDNA” (about the multivalent links between midcentury research on DNA and the discovery of LSD, including the fact that Francis Crick was apparently under the influence of LSD when he first envisioned the double helical structure of the molecule) typifies the provocative quality of these conjunctions. But the more significant attribute that makes this book so important for rhetorical studies is that it depicts rhetoric as a deeply powerful adjunct to all the lines it follows. What this means is that rhetoric here is not merely the stylistic or persuasive adornment of a linguistic content (although it is also that) but is also a constitutive element of what we might very broadly call “experience.” Doyle is at pains to emphasize this point especially through the analysis of trip reports by those who have taken hallucinogenic drugs. It would appear from the sheer quantity of these reports that the ingestion of psychotropic drugs produces an intense desire to generate language—a language that would somehow attempt (and fail) to capture the experience of the trip. But more than that, this language also provides a crucial element of the set and setting that are key elements of all encounters with hallucinogens. “To read trip reports for what they can teach us about psychedelic experience,” Doyle argues, “we must read them as if they are less failed signs of the ineffable than symptoms of, and subsequent frames for, psychedelic states” (54). Turning from a traditional emphasis on language to a contemporary thinking of information allows Doyle to foreground the active quality of rhetoric: “Information is less a phenomenon to be understood than … a potent mutagen of human experience.”The common element shared by the various sites that Doyle investigates—from global and medical imaging, to psychedelic drug use, to the love poetry of Cyrano de Bergerac—is that they all provoke an experience of connectedness, “suggesting that in some fashion human perception is indeed “wired” for a periodic recognition of the dense imbrication of organism and environment” (9). Now of course, this message isn't new or even especially noteworthy, but what Doyle is after here is less the content of the message of interconnection and more the practices and relations through which humans come to attune themselves to this event.What interests Doyle about each of these sites is that they are all involved in pragmatic experiments that explore the distributed quality of life. One of the many things that makes Doyle's itinerary deeply compelling is that he does not follow the theoretical line about the death of the subject or the overcoming of humanism but analyzes the actual practices of people involved in pursuing these projects. Thus, for instance, hallucinogenic drug users (“psychonauts”) are pioneers, “early adopters of a transitional, transhuman identity precipitated by our intensified and amplified ecologies of information in the context of an ecosystem in distress” (230). These psychonauts are not so much attempting to “expand” consciousness (as if consciousness were merely quantitative entities) but to turn it otherwise, to explore its alternate capacities by “troping” consciousness (hence the term “psychotropic” drugs).Interestingly enough, and contra the many so-called postmodern critiques of the value of consciousness, in Doyle's account, consciousness does not disappear. Nor is it merely an epiphenomenon masking certain underlying material practices. Indeed, consciousness plays an extremely crucial role in this newly configured biosphere as “the distributed capacity to manipulate and transform living systems” (252). That is, consciousness allows us (and not only us) to pay attention to certain things in certain ways and is thus deeply motivated by what we can only call “seduction.”This emphasis on seduction connects to what I think is the most powerful argument of the book, that Darwin's evolutionary engine of natural selection has unjustly overshadowed the other evolutionary motor that he discovered: sexual selection. Focusing primarily on The Descent of Man, Doyle shows that “Darwin introduces the possibility that survival comes not to the fittest but to the sexiest, those who are adepts at attention gathering” (139). From the plumage of the peacock, to the petals of the orchid, to the thought troping of peyote, this capacity to seduce and to fascinate may well be the most fundamental, rhetorical (and evolutionary) attribute of life. And this attribute is in marked contrast to some alleged demand that the individual organism exists in robust distinction against its environment. That is, “the experience of seduction … provokes not fitness but entanglement[;] sexual selection excels at the momentary breakdown of inside/outside topologies” (249).Now it is also the case that the psychonauts that Doyle investigates are not at all casual drug users and that they are involved in a very precise and care-ful relationship to psychotropic drugs. This book is not simply advocating for the mind-altering quality of hallucinogens themselves; you will not find anything like a mindless celebration of Burning Man here. When he speaks of those who have managed to “form a commons with ayhuasca” (246), as well as the fascinated (and fascinating) artisans of marijuana cultivation, Doyle is predominantly concerned with those who are dedicated to a connoisseur-like relation to these plants (and to consciousness). This is to say that such psychonauts seem to offer a privileged and perhaps altogether rare relation to “drugs” (and to the nooshpere more generally) in that they are “more than recreational” drug users; they demonstrate “a serious intent” in their relations to the exploration of consciousness (258). And indeed, this raises the essential question (for me) as to what styles of exclusions are necessary for any pedagogy and any rhetoric. But that may be a question for a different review. For the moment, it seems to me that the stakes of ingesting this other Doyle's pedagogy are well worth the risks.

We in composition studies have countered the suspicion that what we do is “simplistic in method and impoverished in content” by insisting on our own disciplinary expertise, an insistence that has gained us administrative support and, arguably, better working conditions. Yet this article explores a problem that arose for the author as a result of her own insistence on disciplinary expertise: she had great difficulty recruiting faculty from other disciplines to teach first-year writing classes. This article suggests a solution to this problem, a strategic disingenuousness derived from the strategy developed by popular sentimental women authors of nineteenth-century America to counter the disciplinary expertise of professional male orators and rhetoricians, who looked down on the untrained speaker. The stance of strategic disingenuousness that this article advocates is more radical than the denial of expertise touted by recent scholarship in WAC and WID: it requires WPAs to withhold their expertise in the absence of any assurancethat the faculty they are training already have within themselves the knowledge they need to teach writing. An admittedly inefficient and often exasperating stance, it nonetheless represents a way for WPAs to entice faculty to teach writing and build a strong community with them.

Article for LiCS special issue The New Activism: Composition, Literacy Studies, and Politics.

AbstractAtom Egoyan's film Ararat advances a rhetoric of mediated mourning that counters Turkish denial of the Armenian genocide. His characters' mourning is mediated in two senses: First, it expresses itself through the production or analy‐sis of visual texts; second, those texts interpose themselves between grieving subjects and the community with whom they identify. while Ararat attempts to visualize the unquenchable urge toward consubstantiality with an ancestral collective, the movie deliberately resists absorption by discourses that render Armenian post-exiles answerable to skeptics and to privileged audiences who appropriate narratives of atrocity for personal catharsis. Notes1. 1I dedicate this essay to my father, Phillip Dwayne Carter (1952–2014). I would also like to thank RR reviewers David Blakesley and Nathaniel Rivers for their trenchant commentary, and Theresa Jarnagin Enos for her guidance and support.2. 2See Siraganian (134) and Parker (1047). What Parker sees as Egoyan's insistence on "intergenerational embrace" also enters into Saroyan's film, which dramatizes young people struggling to support suffering parents as well as parents reaching helplessly toward lost children.3. 3Davis features the quoted passage from Burke's Language as Symbolic Action in her own Inessential Solidarity (33).4. 4See Romney (171) and Torchin (9) for discussions of Spielberg's translation of Holocaust testimony into epic spectacle.5. 5Theriault describes the circumstances of Gorky's emigration in Rethinking Arshile Gorky (15). She also observes that Gorky's ensuing work tended toward abstract experimentalism, as he experienced what Georgiana Banita describes as "an ambivalent relationship to figurative painting" (93). His simultaneous practice and suspicion of figurative representation make him an especially apt ally for Egoyan, who expresses a similar attitude toward mimetic film.6. 6See Inessential Solidarity 21. Although Davis elegantly describes Burke's grounding of identity in multiple, sometimes clashing affinities, she challenges his idea of a biological individual that precedes discourse and that engages in persuasion so as to overcome its originary division from other subjects (23–25). She posits intersubjective union as a constitutive condition rather than a frustrated aspiration.7. 7The Blanchot quotation appears in The Historiographic Perversion (10). In an intriguing turn in the same work, Nichanian also refuses to describe events in Armenia as genocide. He does so, however, from a position deeply opposed to the one adopted by Ali. Nichanian details how historians have demanded copious archival testimony to support the claim of genocide, yet argues that such testimony could never encompass the horror of what took place in Van during and after 1915. Insofar as the idea of genocide makes an intellectual commodity of unrepresentable violence, he finds it inadequate to a Catastrophe that has not ended but continues in the form of concerted denial by the government whose predecessors brought it about.Additional informationNotes on contributorsChristopher CarterChristopher Carter is Associate Professor of English at the University of Cincinnati, where he serves as Composition Director. He is author of Rhetoric and Resistance in the Corporate Academy (Hampton Press, 2008) and previous editor of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor. His essays have appeared in Works and Days, JAC, and College English, and he has written chapters for Tenured Bosses and Disposable Teachers as well as Narrative Acts: Rhetoric, Race and Identity, Knowledge. His second book, Rhetorical Exposures: Confrontation and Contradiction in U. S. Social Documentary Photography, will be published by the University of Alabama Press in 2015.

This commentary is an afterword and response to a cluster of essays on graduate education edited by Leonard Cassuto. Arguing for reform of the academic job system in which most PhDs will become contingent faculty members, the commentary engages principally with the work of David Downing and Marc Bousquet.

This is an economist’s consideration of the PhD job market in English and comparative literature. It provides data about the job market at schools in various tiers, demonstrating that supply of new English PhDs far exceeds demand for English PhDs in tenure-track academic jobs. It suggests a number of policies to improve the situation, including that the MLA strongly encourage programs to provide better job placement data to applying students, programs be tailored to prepare students for the jobs they actually have a chance of getting, and the culminating research focus of the program be rethought.

This article makes the case for expanding our conception of what it means to provide “professional training” to PhD students in departments of English. Rather than focus exclusively on placing students in tenure-track academic appointments, departments should prepare them simultaneously for careers both inside and outside the academy by focusing on the broad range of skills inherent to doctoral training. Such an approach not only will empower graduate students but also may transform the academy itself.

This program profile demonstrates how the first-year writing program at Oakland University has engaged contingent faculty in research, assessment, and program development over the years, employing evidence-based practices to improve individual classroom instruction and to redesign the entire first-year curriculum. The authors describe their efforts to develop an inclusive model for research and professional development, a model that seeks to empower the faculty to join disciplinary conversations about the teaching of writing. Overall, the profile contributes to existing scholarship on large college writing programs by illustrating how faculty may collaborate to develop and assess curricula, to conduct and publish research, and to build a program that shifts the conversation from what individual instructors may believe about writing instruction (“I think”) to what the department may collaboratively know about best practices (“we know”).

Dear Colleagues:I am writing this letter amidst the splendor of a New England fall, a time of year marked by transition from a leafy and robust spring and summer to the inevitable, if brilliant, decline preceding the coming of winter. This fall feels different, however. The loss that fall signifies seems deeper this year, its reach extending back to early summer. I'm referring to the passing of our beloved and inspiring NCTE Executive Director, colleague and friend Kent Williamson. Those who were fortunate to have known and worked with Kent can attest to his singular qualities. A visionary with a clear grasp of the here-and-now, Kent, like no other leader that I've known, saw the Big Picture-he was the best strategic thinker that I've seen-while recognizing the importance of paying attention to the details. He also had the gift of leading while making it seem as if WE were initiating. In other words, Kent was a first-rate listener and believed with his heart and soul that no group can thrive without the full engagement and collaboration of its members. In his memory and with his spirit, the CCCC Officers and NCTE staff will attempt to carry on Kent's work to the best of our abilities. I know that he would expect no less. Now onto my report. . . .FinancesThis organization continued to make investment gains ($216,922) even as it went $120,411 over budget on operations. We ran a genuine loss last year, as spending exceeded income from operations. In FY15 there were a few areas that led to the loss. Membership dues, as an example, are declining. Feedback on the work of the organization was positive, but many could get all they need from CCCC without being members. In the end, we were $13,938 below projections on membership dues.Ultimately, we need to focus more on strategic items based on our vision. We have $2.29 million in the contingency fund, but spending it wisely requires careful planning and making choices.Activities for FY16:* In addition to extending our substantial investment in access and equity ($32,829 for the PEP program to provide registration/support to contingent and adjunct faculty who need help to attend the CCCC Convention), we earmarked up to $3,000 of spending to match funds raised from the membership to provide a CCCC Contingent Faculty Travel Assistance Fund for convention attendance, and $3,000 to support the Chair's Scholarship Fund.* Now that the 5% amount from our contingency reserve is over $120,000, the FY16 budget splits that amount between research grants selected through an open application project (at least $100,000), and the cost of developing a database of graduate and undergraduate writing programs. This makes our investment in member research larger than it has been any year except for FY15, while also providing funds to build a renewable resource of benefit to students, faculty, and program administrators alike.* We included videotaping of member interviews and advocacy training across the convention.* We again provided $8,000 in funding to support a CCCC Policy Fellow position. This person has been working with our DC office to help coordinate follow-through actions in support of reports filed by our new state-based network of higher education policy analysts, and has provided research summaries and expert testimony/insights drawn from professional practice on public policy issues of concern to our organization. The funding provides a small honorarium ($3,000) and travel fund ($5,000) to help support these activities. The CCCC Policy Fellow is selected by the CCCC Chair and Secretary-Treasurer.* Under publications, we extended a third year of funding to support a CCCC Social Media Coordinator. This person works with staff as an independent contractor to both produce online events/discussions of interest to CCCC members (on the Connected Community and across other online social media platforms as well), and to more readily connect members to each other in social media contexts. …

This history explores the early growth of composition faculty between 1960 and 1990, arguing that composition has historically functioned as a site of flexible expertise. As archives of the Modern Language Association’s Job Information List attest, early job advertisements for composition “specialists” defined the work of composition in terms antithetical to specialization, expecting a compositionist to perform a variety of administrative work and to teach comfortably in multiple areas. The flexible identity of the field’s faculty aided its growth during a period when tenure-track faculty waned; composition thrived because faculty could serve multiple institutional roles. This essay calls readers to investigate the ways that composition’s flexibility has impacted and continues to impact the field’s identity and labor structures.

This symposium offers three perspectives on how permanent non-tenure track faculty are positioned to effect change in English departments and writing programs, as well as some of the obstacles they face in doing so.

Reviews Christopher Reid, "Imprison'd Wranglers": The Rhetorical Culture ofthe House ofCommons, 1760-1800, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. 270 pp., ISBN: 978-0-19-958109-2 As rhetoricians expand the parameters of rhetorical histories, the inter­ actions between politicians and the people on "Main Street" or "out of doors" become as important as the words of famous orators. In Imprison'd Wranglers, Christopher Reid extends this approach to the eighteenth-century British Parliament. He argues for a "rhetorical culture" surrounding the House of Commons in an era when politicians became public figures. According to Reid, new relationships developed between Members and constituents with the expansion of print culture: "eloquence was flowing outside the House, to be captured, admired, or caricatured in print, before flowing back in the form of pamphlets and newspaper reports... which were read in the Chamber " (p. 14). By tracing this flow through multiple institutions and media, he produces a comprehensive account of change and continuity in parliamentary oratory. The title of Reid's book comes from William Cowper's The Task (1785), in which the poet, reading newspaper reports of debates, longs to "set th' im­ prison'd wranglers free." While Cowper reconstructs orators' performances, Reid examines now MPs were metaphorically "imprisoned" in the "chain of newspaper mediations that brought speech events in Westminster" to distant constituents and reassesses the rhetorical dynamics of distributing parliamentary speech in print (p. 3). By addressing "the complex reciprocity between print and oratory" in late eighteenth-century Britain, Imprison'd Wranglers complements recent work by Carolyn Eastman (A Nation ofSpeechifiers , 2009) and Sandra Gustafson (Imagining Deliberative Democracy, 2011), who explore how printed American oratory fostered new political identities in the new nation and promoted new forms of rhetorical education at the turn of the nineteenth century (Eastman, p. 10). Reid likewise studies how print reconstructions of the British Commons "brought parliamentary debate onto a broader terrain of public argument," "permanently altered the rhetorical context" of political speech, and gave the people "a stake in Parliament" (Reid, p. 11, 75). To survey the breadth of Parliament's "rhetorical culture," Reid exam­ ines newspapers, pamphlets, letters, collections like William Cobbett's ParliaRhetorica , Vol. XXXII, Issue 3, pp. 312-323, ISSN 0734-8584, electronic ISSN 15338541 . ©2014 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights re­ served. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintlnfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/RH.2014.32.3.312. Reviews 313 ntaty History ofEngland, and satirical sketches (p. 3). The architecture of the Chamber, the classical curriculum, and the working conditions of newspaper reporters also come under his purview. He draws on political historians like David Cannadine and Joanna Innes but approaches parliamentary texts and practices as a historian of rhetoric. Reid compares parliamentary speaking techniques to classical and eighteenth-century rhetorical theories and ad­ dresses the challenges of working with transcripts of oral performances. For him, reporters transcripts matter less as accurate representations of speech than as efforts to represent "the House as a place of collective rhetorical action ... in which political arguments and meanings were forged" (p. 17). These archives, including the transcripts, the Chamber, and reporting practices, re­ veal how oratory circulated beyond the Chamber and brought constituents into the political nation. Imprison'd Wranglers comprises four sections: Part 1 (Chapter 2) ap­ plies Roxanne Mountford's "geography of a communicative event" to St. Stephen's Chapel, the home of the eighteenth-century Commons (p. 25). The three chapters of Part 2 discuss how Parliament reached the public through the "fictitious tribunals of the press" (Chapter 3), reporters who copied debates from memory (Chapter 4), and visual satirists like James Gillray (Chapter 5) (p. 75). In Part 3, Reid examines how MPs modified classical rhetorical practices including declamation (Chapter 6) and the con­ cept of ethos (Chapter 7) in the face of increasing publicity. Part 4 features a broader view of parliamentary rhetorical culture with a case study of the 1773 Lord Clive debates (Chapter 8) and an exploration of MPs' persuasive uses of quotation (Chapter 9). Reid concludes with...

Winner of the 2014 Computers and Composition Michelle Kendrick Outstanding Digital Scholarship Award Con Job: Stories of Adjunct and Contingent Labor describes and makes visible the pedagogical, economic, and ethical costs of higher education’s growing reliance on adjunct and contingent faculty. Armed with a borrowed video camera, Megan Fulwiler and Jennifer Marlow, two teachers of composition, set out to record the voices of faculty who are often invisible in and marginalized by the institutions where they teach.

As I prepare to teach the latest iteration of my course in Visualizing Information, I am struck by how quickly visualization software and techniques are advancing. As an academic, whose primary job is as a researcher and teacher, my relationship with technology is rooted at the crossroads of excitement and dread; of just catching up and being perpetually behind. I feel excitement that advancements in web functionality and design, visualization techniques, and other technology-enabled practices are finally happening and can benefit my work and the work of my students. Conversely I am filled with dread that I rarely feel fully in-the-know, much less at the bleeding edge of these developments because my job doesn't necessarily reward that kind of knowledge. As a graduate student in the fall of 2000 (Is that really 14 years ago?) I earned a webmaster certification and followed that by helping in the redesign of several websites at my university. A decade later, as an assistant professor on the tenure clock, I was composing an academic webtext and I found myself needing the help of an undergraduate student to teach me how to integrate something called jQuery into my HTML5. I was dismayed over how rusty my skills had become once my tenure responsibilities had taken over.

This program profile examines the storied and conflicted five-decade genealogy of the Stony Brook University writing program. From the points of view of former administrators of this program who were faculty members during two of its most significant transitional periods, the authors make a case for the utmost importance of faculty community and reflectiveness, discourse-empowered advocacy, and shared governance to the well-being of postsecondary writing programs. In this context, the profile maintains a particular focus on disciplinary identity formation, including its effects on curriculum, working conditions, and placement and assessment practices.

Present Tense is happy to announce that two of our Editors have taken tenure-track positions this last year. Alexandra Hidalgo, our Multimedia Editor, is now at Michigan State University, and Jessica E. Clements, our Style Editor, is at Whitworth University.

Higher education researchers have called for systemic changes in graduate education, their concerns fueled in part by poor attrition and completion rates and dismal academic job markets.Many have recommended that universities provide writing support for doctoral students at the dissertation stage. Writing researchers have an opportunity to inform these discussions. However,more research is needed to understand how graduate students’ experiences with research writing differ across disciplines and how they experience responses to their research writing from advisors, graduate peers, and journal reviewers. This study utilizes systems theory to examine one nonnative English–speaking student writing for publication as part of an environmental sciencesdoctoral program. Data consist of field interviews, semi-structured and text-based interviews with students and program faculty, and side-by-side comparison of textual revisions. Theresults describe ways traditional notions of dissertations as individual research conflicted with collaborative writing processes in the sciences and affected how the student received responses tohis writing. Additionally, this study examines the “information flow” of feedback, identifying instances in which the student was isolated from possible feedback sources and difficulties thestudent encountered in adapting past feedback to complete novel tasks. This study points to key ways writing researchers can inform current efforts to restructure doctoral research through further systems-based explorations into students’ writing experiences and models of program design that better leverage potential sources of feedback.

Drawing on findings from three qualitative studies, this article explores the distinct professional identities of two-year college English faculty. We examine full-time faculty patterns of engagement with professional organizations, their assertion of professional authority in institutional decision making, and the role of organizational socialization in the shaping of part-time faculty professional identities.

This essay revisits and expands on Gary A. Olson and Joseph M. Moxley’s 1989 article “Directing Freshman Composition: The Limits of Authority” by looking at revised notions of writing program administrators’ work and authority in 2012. Whereas the original essay surveyed only department chairs, our study includes data from both department chairs and directors of first-year writing to explore issues of authority. The essay complicates Olson and Moxley’s notion of authority, distinguishing among power, authority, and influence, and examining how they inflect the work of directors of first-year writing. In addition, common assumptions about the connections between WPAs’ tenure status and authority are re-examined in light of survey results.

Based on interviews with fifty-seven scholars in rhetoric and composition, this article addresses multiple topics in relation to the job search process. I emphasize the need for a more critical examination of job market procedures field-wide, taking into consideration the ways in which hiring committees might be unknowingly enacting exclusionary practices.

This article argues that tenure and promotion decisions should reflect the fundamental ways in which the academy and our positions within it have changed. Calling attention to the role senior scholars can play, the article considers the challenges offered by activity in four areas: digital and new-media scholarship, editorial and curatorial work, administration and leadership, and mentoring.

The life of an adjunct is never slow. This essay looks into the professional and personal life of a community college teacher working at multiple colleges who wonders, like many others, how she will hold it all together and provide the quality of teaching that her students deserve.

The contemporary American political landscape is littered with talk of apology. Throughout the 2012 presidential campaign, both camps sparred over when, why, and to whom apologies should be made. The most striking clash occurred in July 2012. The Obama camp ran a series of campaign advertisements alleging that the then presumptive Republican nominee had in fact remained at Bain Capitol in a leadership role longer than he had claimed, bolstering their characterization of Romney as a businessman whose business was not good for America.1 When Romney's aide failed to quiet the critique by claiming that the candidate had “retired retroactively” (DeLong 2012), Romney himself took to the airwaves to speak to the situation. On Friday, 13 July, he appeared on five different networks to condemn these types of attacks and to call for a campaign centered on issues, sidestepping the question of his tenure at Bain. In an ABC interview, Romney emphatically stated, “He [Obama] sure as heck ought to say that he's sorry for the kinds of attacks that are coming from his team” (Shear 2012). When asked, Obama and his team refused comment. The next day, however, a video advertisement posted on YouTube titled “Mitt Romney: Asking for Apologies”—attributed to the “Truth Team”—did respond in a manner that was read by pundits as a blatant refusal of Romney's demand for an apology. Interspersed with clips of Romney claiming that Obama does not understand freedom and that he should be apologizing to America rather than for it, appeared three simple blue screens that read: “Mitt Romney. He sure asks for a lot of apologies. When he's not busy launching attacks.”This exchange triggered almost predictable responses from political commentators. On the right, Obama's refusal to apologize was read as a white flag—an admission that he could say nothing without publicly acknowledging the lies he told for political gain. On the left, Romney's demand was read as an attempt to evade the questions raised by the advertisements, although some read it as even less than this, equating Romney's demand with “crying uncle” (Easley 2012). Had the back and forth of the commentary been even somewhat novel, it might have become exhausting. As it played out, however, it just lay there already dead in the water, waiting for the next wave of issues and predictable responses to wash over it.One might certainly read this scene with a sort of cynicism or even nostalgia for a time in our political life when things were otherwise—when the truth of speech mattered or apologies were read on a moral register. I think both attitudes, however, miss the larger point. The quickness with which we discount political speech, having seen for years what lies behind the curtain, and our obsession with memories of times that perhaps never were, keep us from investigating how this beastly creature, the “demand for apology,” operates. We say almost nothing about it, preferring to lament the state of political rhetoric more generally or reading it from and through established political stances. The rich body of literature produced by rhetorical theorists and critics about apology itself offers us important insights into the potential and limits of such speech acts. Yet these studies rarely include a sustained investigation of the demand for apology, and if they do, they make certain presumptions about the operations of demands that are suspect. In response, this essay highlights the need for a study of the rhetorical complexities of demands that examines the conditions through which these speech acts structure and invoke another's response, revealing how a demand for apology both constitutes and is conditioned by the scene in which this demand takes place. Implicitly then, this argument pushes us toward a renewed interrogation of rhetoric's scene of address.Demands for apology are curious in that apologies proffered in response sometimes fail to sufficiently resolve the demand. Such scenes are familiar to us. I demand an apology from you for something you have said or done, and you turn to say “sorry.” Your apology though, however uttered, does not fully satisfy me. Perhaps it is because I had to ask you to apologize in the first place, to point out that what you have said or done is wrong or injurious. Perhaps it is because, given the injury I incurred, your apology does not quite feel like enough. In any case, the anger or hurt that prompted my demand might in fact remain even after you apologize. Such emotions might be magnified in the context of apologies offered on behalf of a state to a specific group or population. It is easy to imagine how apologies might fail to “make up for” historical atrocities. “We're sorry” can hardly right involuntary internment, abuse of indigenous peoples, institutionalized racism, or genocide. But, to be fair, demands for apology rarely ask this much; that is, they do not ask for the situation to be “fixed” but rather addressed (ethically).That an apology conditions and performs an ethical address is worth noting only if we understand the complex ways in which language trips us up, causing the apology to stumble in the face of a demand. Sara Ahmed's work here is helpful. She argues that the difficulty of any apology is that its utterance cannot on its own perform the work that a demand demands. “Of course,” she explains, “the gap between saying sorry and being sorry cannot be filled, even by a ‘good performance’ of the utterance” (2004, 114). Felicitous or not, the performance of an apology—both what it says and how it is said—cannot effect, guarantee, or authenticate what Ahmed takes as the object of a demand for apology: feeling sorry. Thus into this scene of address—and Ahmed is clear that apology must be read as an interlocutionary scene—a problem of recognition appears that confounds the work of an apology. She explains: So the receiver has to judge whether the utterance is readable as an apology. So the following question becomes intelligible: Does “this” apology “apologise”? The action of the apology is curiously dependent on its reception. The apology may “do something” in the event that the other is willing to receive the utterance as an apology, a willingness, which will depend on the conditions in which the speech act was uttered. (2004, 115) The success of an apology depends then not on what is said or the emotion it conveys but on how this apology is “taken up” and read. Thus the one who demands an apology judges whether the apology meets the conditions of recognizability in the particular context.Paradoxically, however, the very terms that render an apology recognizable might effectively strip the demand for this apology of its force. In recent work, Adam Ellwanger suggests that apologies are only read as such when they perform metanoia, the subject's internal conversion or transformation. (I have apologized when I show you that I am a changed person.) Ellwanger demonstrates quite convincingly, however, that the performance of this metanoia in an apology negates or undermines the force of the demand. Understanding apologies as (speech) acts of public humiliation that ultimately bring the offender in line with public norms of civility (2012, 309), Ellwanger claims that in the apology, “the activity of confession itself becomes the punitive mechanism. This creates the illusion of self-censure, a phenomenon that is crucial to punitive apologetics” (2012, 310). The apology thus renders the demand that occasioned it at best irrelevant and at worst logically suspect. What makes it irrelevant is that the self-punishment enacted in the apology appears to be self-motivated; the confession evidences an internal transformation of a subject that, for Ellwanger, occurs “independently of his accusers' demands” (2012, 324). I see the error of my ways and find myself a changed person because of what I now know and understand. The demand is occluded because I am both the origin and the effect of this self-transformation. And what makes it logically suspect is that the demand for apology promises forgiveness in exchange for a form of punishment predicated on relationships that prohibit this forgiveness. As Ellwanger explains, “The covertly punitive goals of the call for apology ensure that the dialogue will be defined by agonism and antipathy on both sides—conditions that make forgiveness and reconciliation all but impossible” (2012, 326).That demands for apology end in paradox may lead to the conclusion that discourses of apology might have limited application in public arenas. Ellwanger himself argues that “a space that is more conducive to honest dialogue and negotiation” is possible if only we rethink the demand for apology as “the kategoria that initiates a conversation where the accused offender engages in a vocal defense of himself, while the accusers seek to prove his guilt” (2012, 326). For him, it is best not to force “a necessarily dubious metanoia” (2012, 326). Instead, we should understand apologetic speech as an antagonistic debate that allows “for the possibility that the offender does not want reconciliation” (2012, 326). In the end, Ellwanger claims that “minimizing the emphasis on forgiveness and admitting the conflict at the heart of public apologetic discourse might temper our expectations for its outcomes” (2012, 326).Although Ellwanger is right to caution against an understanding of apology as an act that brings about a total reconciliation or transformation, it is hard to imagine how the demand for apology can bring about anything but stasis. If, for instance, we read our original scene through Ellwanger, we see how Romney's demand for an apology becomes the occasion for a conversation in which both parties might state their case without seeking to reconcile their positions. Romney levels an accusation that the Obama team is telling lies for political gain rather than engaging the issues; the “Truth Team” opts for a preschooler's response of “he did it first” rather than explains why Obama will not or should not apologize for the claims made in the advertisement. In this example, the call of the demand and the response of the (non)apology become unhinged. The advertisement for Obama does not address the complaints Romney levels. Instead, it takes the occasion of the demand to address the American people, suggesting that we are in on the joke that is the demand. Romney is no worse for wear, though, given that his demand for apology never turned on Obama's response (or nonresponse, as the case may be). That Romney issued the demand allows him to stake a claim to a moral position within the political scene. The content of the demand is to some extent irrelevant because it is the act of demanding itself that is meant to accomplish his goals. These goals are revealed in what he says immediately after he issues his demand for apology. Romney comments that the president's allegations are “very disappointing” given his promises in the first campaign (Shear 2012). Romney thereby claims the high ground, a position from which he takes authority to pass judgment on Obama's speech and actions. What is so interesting in this overly familiar political strategy is that it renders any response inconsequential. This demand does not call for a response or invoke an other.2 It is instead a performance of the place (and the power) the speaker claims by virtue of the demand. All are called here to witness this spectacle but certainly not to engage it or question it. So the “conversation” begun by the demand ends with it as well, revealing a stasis that might be honest at the cost of truth.This is not, as some rhetorical scholars would have us believe, the necessary result of a political life constituted in and through agonistic debate. It gestures to a larger set of questions about the rhetorical-ethical contours of the demand for apology for which current scholarship fails to fully account. How does the demand invoke the other or bind another in an address? How does this invocation place the interlocutors in relation to each other? What are the conditions in which this relation functions ethically? The complexity of these questions confound us when we take for granted the conditions of the demand's recognizability. Considerations of the demand for apology (which may be treated as supplemental to the exploration of apology itself) often proceed from the premise that the terms of a demand merely represent or narrate some previous injury, suggesting an ontologically and temporally prior recognition of a particular history of injury or violence. When demands for apology are made, that is, we presume that they seek redress for historical acts that have already been deemed and recognized as morally wrong. Ahmed, for instance, claims that a demand for apology “exposes the history of violence to others, who are now called upon to bear witness to the injustice” (2004, 119). As an expository act, all the demand seemingly does, then, is carry forward a history that it itself does not constitute or color. Interlocutors in this scene are asked to “bear witness” to this history or respond to it through an apology, accounting for their role in this history. Because we do not account for the history itself—its constitution and the rhetorical conditions in which it is addressed to an audience—we lose a sense of the very thing that marks a demand as a demand: risk. As Alexander García Düttmann explains: One can say that a demand is marked by an uncertainty because every demand requires uncertainty as the medium in which it is raised. One can say that a demand is marked by an uncertainty because nothing ensures that a response will ensue, whether the one who makes the demand encounters indifference or whether there is no one to hear the demand. Finally one can say that a demand is marked by an uncertainty because the seriousness of a demand (for recognition) cannot be guaranteed; on each occasion one must decide anew whether another person's demand (for recognition) is feigned or whether it is meant seriously. (2000, 10–11) Risk attends the demand not only because we cannot predict or guarantee a response but also because the demand itself seeks recognition as a demand. In the case of a demand for apology, the history revealed in the demand is an uncertain history because it needs recognition for both the content of the history (is this what happened?) and the telling of the story (is this telling an act of laying bare history or is it the premise of a joke?).Theorists of demands for apology also seem to presume a kind of standing for the subject of the demand. We are, as we must be, always already on the scene when we give an account of a demand for an apology. To speak of or theorize this demand and its effect, that is, one presumes that there is an already established relationship between the one who demands and the addressee of that demand. We might argue that this relationship is inaugurated in and through the injury and therefore has been structured prior to this demand. Is it the case, however, that if our account of the demand precedes from an already inhabited scene, then it must follow that the demand had no influence on setting this scene? In other words, how might the demand change the structure of address? To answer these questions, we turn for a moment to a consideration of the scene itself. In Ellwanger's work we are met with a claim that demands for apology operate as a kategoria—an accusation made in a court of law that calls for a defense. Linking contemporary demands for apology to the kategoria of antiquity, Ellwanger argues that rethinking demands as the beginning of a conversation can help us understand the role of apology in creating productive debate. Yet what Ellwanger, like many others, ignores is that the kategoria binds the other in conversation because it invokes the authority and the conventions of the legal scene. The accusation calls on the other to respond because it speaks in the name of law. Here is where the Burkean understanding of a scene fails us. The scene is not merely a “container” for the speech act, a place or landscape in which a demand is made. The force of the demand comes from and constitutes the scene in which it operates. As Judith Butler reminds us, “In order to have that relation of responsiveness, one needs already to be in a relationship to a set of others in which one can be addressed or can be appealed to in some way. In other words, one needs to be disposed to hearing, one needs to be in the scene of interlocution, one needs first to establish such a scene in order to be responsive” (Murray 2007, 418–19). We are called then to understand the ways that demands for apology are conditioned by and structure scenes of address. To do so illustrates how the demand places the speaker at risk. One can demand recognition only if one is dislocated by it. I demand an apology not as the subject who was injured but as the subject whose standing—the right and authority to speak before the other—is in jeopardy. To make a demand places me in a tenuous position. Against a history of violence or injury that almost always revokes my authority to speak, I demand “as if” I already inhabit a place in the scene of address that authorizes my speech and obligates you to respond, aware that it might establish the very conditions under which I suffered injury.To examine a demand for apology rhetorically is thus to read for how language mediates the risk of subjects and histories as it constitutes the scene of address in which it operates. With this insight, we return to our beginning. Romney's demand for apology, when examined closely, shows itself to be simply obscene. The language of his demand carries and covers over a history that authorizes Romney's standing in the scene. “He sure as heck ought to say that he's sorry for the kinds of attacks that are coming from his team” (Shear 2012). This might be the “folksy” language of George Bush or Sarah Palin to which we've become accustomed. But it also harkens back to a 1950s suburban vernacular in which Romney's standing to demand an apology would have gone unquestioned. While conjuring a scene that confirms his own authority to make the demand in the terms that he does, Romney's language mitigates the risk associated with claiming a place in the scene of address by sealing off this scene and placing it against (and the contemporary political it against the scene. Romney's demand is not issued to Obama out for a the demand invokes no one in particular even as it to witness the attacks that are the of his The risk is because the scene of the demand is with the the perhaps more with the contemporary political scene at demand is thus offered from an that can be seen but not addressed or in the As a his demand offers the a of the and place by a different As an act that the scene of though, the demand speech, the that speak within and to it. In the place of speech, we are only with a of that of truth to the very of political